Welcome to this week’s blog, and our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

Peter Robinson’s Children of the Revolution has been amusing PatLux, who tells us:

I just read this passage where a detective goes to interview an academic in his office:

‘To say it was book-lined would be both too generous and inaccurate; it was book-crammed, book-piled, book-besotted. They were everywhere. They probably bred overnight. The room even smelled of books. Here was a man who had never heard of a Kindle. The books were on the wall-to-wall shelves, on the floor, on the windowsills, the chairs, on every flat surface, and even balanced on some of the curved or angled ones.’

I’m sure a few of us can relate to that. I also recognise tiktix’s reaction to George Orwell’s Collected Essays:

The one that has stuck with me is The Lion and The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941). This post-election period seemed like a good time to revisit, what I feel, is a quintessentially English essay. It has much insight about what being English consists of (at least to me as an immigrant who lives in England) and it does so without the laziness of flotsam stereotyping even once – although he does have the bit about bad teeth in there somewhere. He talks about the tendency of English to rise in the face of bullying, but fizzle out in the face of boredom as a nation. It chimes in so much with the current times and all the madness that is around us, that one can’t but help exclaim, ‘YES! I know EXACTLY what you mean!’ a number of times while reading it. Such a marvellous piece of writing.

Talking of marvellous writing, MissBurgundy has been reading No Enemy by the great Ford Madox Ford:

He wrote it in 1919 (in the cottage that is the setting for his Last Post, and which is also the setting for this book) but it was only published in the US in 1929, and in Britain only in 2002. I’m not sure how well the book works but I came away with a real impression of the fragile state of mind that Ford and so many others would have been in in 1919. The horrors they had seen and the losses they had suffered made them want (like Christopher Tietjens) to bury themselves away in the English countryside. It’s a fictional account of Ford’s life immediately after the war, a bit disjointed, remembering episodes from the war mixed with the idyllic peace of the countryside after the horrors of the trenches.

On an entirely different note, paulburns has been impressed by Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time:

I don’t read a lot of science fiction. This book though, is something else again. Humans terraform a distant planet and release hundreds of monkeys, and a nanovirus to speed their evolution. Trouble is, a terrorist blows up the ship and the monkeys, and only the nanovirus survives while the head scientist, who is quite mad, orbits the planet in a satellite, and is kept alive by artificial intelligence. On the planet far below, spiders become the dominant intelligent species, evolving for millenia. And what a fascinating and engaging bunch of aliens they are; going from barbarism, via religion, the god being the scientist in the satellite, through science to their full potential.

If you’re a science fiction buff, I’d say this one is a must. That spider civilisation is a magnificent imaginative creation.

Finally, another snippet from Robinson’s Children of the Revolution, courtesy of PatLux:

She had even read a Jean-Paul Sartre novel once to impress a boyfriend. It hadn’t worked, so she never read another.

Yes, I can relate to that too.

Interesting links about books and reading

• How to raise a reader, according to the New York Times. (Hat tip to WebberExpat)
• One from the vaults. Alfred Wainwright refuses to take any books to his island on Desert Island Discs.
• A map of all the locations in Virginia Woolf’s novels.

If you would like to share a photo of the book you are reading, or film your own book review, please do. Click the blue button on this page to share your video or image. I’ll include some of your posts in next week’s blog.

If you’re on Instagram and a book lover, chances are you’re already sharing beautiful pictures of books you are reading: “shelfies” or all kinds of still lifes with books as protagonists. Now, you can share your reads with us on the mobile photography platform – simply tag your pictures there with #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection here. Happy reading!